Germany’s Immigration Meltdown
28th January 2025
He came from Afghanistan through Bulgaria, where he had registered his claim for asylum. In 2022, he travelled through the EU’s open borders to Germany where he settled in the north-western Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg. Last Wednesday, the man, now 28 years old, walked into a park in the city centre where he knifed a two-year-old boy to death, injured two other children, and then killed the 41-year-old man who had tried to stop him. He was finally intercepted by the police at a nearby rail track after a short chase.
The shocking attack has reignited the debate about immigration only weeks before the German federal elections on February 23, and exposed the weakness of its political elites. Friedrich Merz, the leader of the CDU opposition and front-runner in the race to be chancellor, will propose legislation this week to permanently end free movement across all of Germany’s borders. Radical enough in itself, such a change would signal the end of the political firewall, or Brandmauer, his party had erected against the far-Right Alternative for Germany. The firewall is a pledge among the mainstream parties that there would be no co-operation with the AfD under any circumstances — no coalition, no confidence and supply agreement, and no joint legislation at federal level.